Build Flink

In addition you need Maven 3 and a JDK (Java Development Kit). Flink requires at least Java 8 to build.

NOTE: Maven 3.3.x can build Flink, but will not properly shade away certain dependencies. Maven 3.2.5 creates the libraries properly.
To build unit tests use Java 8u51 or above to prevent failures in unit tests that use the PowerMock runner.

To clone from git, enter:

git clone https://github.com/apache/flink

The simplest way of building Flink is by running:

mvn clean install-DskipTests

This instructs Maven (mvn) to first remove all existing builds (clean) and then create a new Flink binary (install).

To speed up the build you can skip tests, QA plugins, and JavaDocs:

mvn clean install-DskipTests-Dfast

The default build adds a Flink-specific JAR for Hadoop 2, to allow using Flink with HDFS and YARN.

Dependency Shading

Flink shades away some of the libraries it uses, in order to avoid version clashes with user programs that use different versions of these libraries. Among the shaded libraries are Google Guava, Asm, Apache Curator, Apache HTTP Components, Netty, and others.

The dependency shading mechanism was recently changed in Maven and requires users to build Flink slightly differently, depending on their Maven version:

Maven 3.0.x, 3.1.x, and 3.2.x
It is sufficient to call mvn clean install -DskipTests in the root directory of Flink code base.

Maven 3.3.x
The build has to be done in two steps: First in the base directory, then in the distribution project:

Hadoop Versions

Info Most users do not need to do this manually. The download page contains binary packages for common Hadoop versions.

Flink has dependencies to HDFS and YARN which are both dependencies from Apache Hadoop. There exist many different versions of Hadoop (from both the upstream project and the different Hadoop distributions). If you are using a wrong combination of versions, exceptions can occur.

Hadoop is only supported from version 2.4.0 upwards.
You can also specify a specific Hadoop version to build against:

mvn clean install-DskipTests-Dhadoop.version=2.6.1

Vendor-specific Versions

To build Flink against a vendor specific Hadoop version, issue the following command:

Scala Versions

Info Users that purely use the Java APIs and libraries can ignore this section.

Flink has APIs, libraries, and runtime modules written in Scala. Users of the Scala API and libraries may have to match the Scala version of Flink with the Scala version of their projects (because Scala is not strictly backwards compatible).

Flink 1.4 currently builds only with Scala version 2.11.

We are working on supporting Scala 2.12, but certain breaking changes in Scala 2.12 make this a more involved effort. Please check out this JIRA issue for updates.

Encrypted File Systems

If your home directory is encrypted you might encounter a java.io.IOException: File name too long exception. Some encrypted file systems, like encfs used by Ubuntu, do not allow long filenames, which is the cause of this error.

The workaround is to add:

<args><arg>-Xmax-classfile-name</arg><arg>128</arg></args>

in the compiler configuration of the pom.xml file of the module causing the error. For example, if the error appears in the flink-yarn module, the above code should be added under the <configuration> tag of scala-maven-plugin. See this issue for more information.